There is a part of me that is quite empty indeed. There was someone there once, but now a section of my heart has been emptied, save for the dust and webs.
That part of me was once inhabited by a vampire.
I never understood it, at first, how I would have a morbid fascination with dead bodies, why seeing blood on the evening news made my stomach double over in hunger and make my brain work double.
I never understood why I hurt people.
See, when I was about nine, I felt these… I don’t know, erotic urges. There was something lustful about them. Not sexual so much as… wanting to take. Wanting to control, a part of me commanding subservience. A desire to coerce people, usually my age but often older, into opening their skin and serving me their blood.
I’d arrange meetings sometimes, so that I could seduce someone into surrendering. Other times I’d camouflage myself in the night, exercising expert stealth to sneak into a home and sap the occupants of their lives. I realize, looking back, that it was a force of impulse, like going out for a midnight snack run.
By night I was this… creature. Something animal and savage, something my conscious mind thought that I had to subdue. And by day I was this magnetic personality… but people I was around complained of fatigue and headaches while I felt more alive for it.
But this wasn’t my identity at all. Were my nighttime ventures were a regression to animalistic behavior, something primal and beneath my consciousness, my “real” self?
No, this wasn’t any regressive behavior. This was an alternate personality, a roommate in the cell of my body. A vampiric parasite within a parasite… one who fed off of those I fed off of for it.
Doctors were baffled by my wounds on the night I attempted to kill myself. There was no knife, no razor, nothing metal of any kind. There wasn’t any blood on the floor, only on my shirt. It was as if an animal tried to attack me, then cleaned up after it was done. This, for all intensive purposes, was true.
I remember the illusions, the dementia, the hallucinations. This alternate, this parasite, wanted me that night. My life was the candle it wished to snuff.
I fought it, with all my might. But the insanity grew to the point I couldn’t bear. The illusions too powerful, the dementia too strong, the hallucinations… too real. The vampire cut my wrists with its fangs…my teeth… and began to drink.
Finally, it decided to leave. I couldn’t survive in the state in which it left me. I gasped for breath and called the police.
I claimed that I couldn’t remember what happened. It would be too unbelievable. How should I know? I scarcely believed it myself.
I researched after that, learned what vampirism meant for people. Both bloodlust and psychic draining were things of which I was guilty, and as soon as I learned of them, I did my best to control them.
To this day, I still absorb an essence from people I come in contact with. They’ll complain of fatigue while I wonder where a memory came from. They’ll wonder at a headache while I decipher one of the questions burning in the backs of their minds. I don’t draw it in at all, it simply comes. A magnet amidst iron flakes.
But the bloodlust has gone, its host with it. For fear of harming myself or a dear one again, I took a nail file to my mouth, grinding away the points of my sharp canines. In doing so, I ground away the base of the small house that once contained this parasite. To this day, it has never returned. It knows, I reason, it would come back to an empty home with no one to welcome it. I pray it feels the same. Its tools of the trade gone, its mission to destroy me failed, its one-time companion having closed the door to it. Ground down fangs hardly make suitable tools of its trade, and a one-time victim hardly makes a suitable host.
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